Unknown Class “ProfileCommon”

I was asked to have a look at a Web Site project, and whether it could be converted into a Web Application project. So I created a web application project, copied and added all project files, and after a bit of editing (adding namespaces, etc.) I came across the error:

The type or namespace name ‘ProfileCommon’ could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)

I soon found out that the class ProfileCommon is being automatically generated during the build process of a Web Site project, and in the meantime a VS BuildTask and a couple lines of code can be found on the internetz which replicate to original code generator.

To understand what it going on, I opened the original web site project, searched for a reference to ProfileCommon, and hit Go To Definition to retrieve the generated code.

As it turns out, the generator simply parses the configuration/system.web/profile/properties section of the web site’s web.config file.

Every item in the section contains a property definition in the form

<add name="[PropertyName]" defaultValue="[value]" 
    type="[.Net Datatype]" />

From this information, the generator creates a public class like this:

using System;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.Profile;

public class ProfileCommon : System.Web.Profile.ProfileBase {

Each declared property is generated as

  public virtual [Datatype] [PropertyName] {
    get {
      return (([Datatype)(this.GetPropertyValue("[PropertyName]")));
    }
    set {
      this.SetPropertyValue("[PropertyName]", value);
    }
  }

and finally

  public virtual ProfileCommon GetProfile(string username) {
    return ((ProfileCommon)(ProfileBase.Create(username)));
  }
}

My guess is that the ProfileBase.GetPropertyValue() method also evaluates the defaultValue clause somehow, but MSDN does not mention this question.